Caroline Priddle
Over the past four weeks we have all become very familiar with dirt. Most of the time my feelings towards the dirt were negative. It stained my clothes, got in my food and followed me everywhere I went. We often joked that we were “becoming one with the dirt”. Throughout my time at field school however, I came to learn that there’s a lot more to dirt than what’s on the surface.
In our last two weeks of the course, as we began our stage 2 and stage 3 survey, I developed a new feeling towards the dirt, one slightly more positive than before: relief. Specifically, the relief of reaching subsoil. Subsoil is the layer below topsoil where culturally relevant material can be found. There is typically a distinct change in colour and texture between topsoil and subsoil. When doing stage 2 survey, we were instructed to dig 30 cm diameter test pits at 5 m intervals until we reached 5 cm into subsoil. As a result, we became more familiar with the physical characteristics of subsoil. I was amazed at how much these could vary across such a small area.
During our stage 3 survey, the relief of reaching subsoil was even stronger. Stage 3 involved pairing up with another student to dig a 1×1 m unit in 10 cm intervals, once again until we reached 5 cm into subsoil. Some groups took longer to complete their units than others, and as Mason and I were on the slower end of the spectrum, we were very relieved when we finally saw the rusty red subsoil at the bottom of our unit.
We then had to document our finished unit by completing a unit form, a wall profile and a plan drawing. Part of this process included recording the colour of the soil in the different layers. To help with this, we used the Munsell soil colour chart. The Munsell colour chart is a tool that allows colour, something we usually perceive as subjective, to become an exact science. It is a spectrum of colour swatches that are based on the three characteristics of colour: hue, value, and chroma (Munsell 1905). It allows our descriptions of colours to be objective and universal and it eliminates any ambiguity that may be caused by our, as Albert Munsell described them, incongruous and bizarre colour names (Munsell 1905).
Munsell, Albert Henry. 1905. A Color Notation. G.H. Ellis Co., Boston.
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